Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this very important matter. I was at a presentation by the CIF on housing the other night about the future forecast for the industry for Galway and the region. It is interesting that some of the things that came out of that are very similar to what we are speaking about here regarding, number one, planning, the planning process, and how long it takes. The second very important issue is that resources going into local authorities need to be beefed up to deal with the now more complex planning processes we have. We have a climate action plan now that has to be built into all of planning. We do not have the expertise within the local authorities to deal with the applications that are coming in regarding that particular field, for example. There is no point in saying that we will bring in all of these policies and legislation and then trying to follow it up with the resources that are needed. It definitely needs to be looked at, as every local authority planning department in this country now has approximately treble the work to do with any application that comes into it. Such departments have to do it right because the judicial review process is there and it is being taken up as one would take up a glass of water at times.

The other thing that came out of that particular conference was the fact that the private housing market is dysfunctional and continues to remain so. The cost of land, of building houses and of making a profit for the developers - whether we like it or not - and the price they can get for houses is not sustainable. The other issue is that they cannot get the required funding to fund these developments through the normal channels they were getting them through before. We have to look at this. If we are otherwise to remain reliant on the State to fund social housing, affordable housing and all of the other housing types, we will end up with the State financing all of these. There are people out there who want to own their own houses and who want to invest in their own houses but we need to create the pathway.

I will give an example of one of the frustrating things that happens. We all know that we are crying out for people to come back from wherever they are and return to Ireland to work. I have a case of a nurse who returned and got a job with the HSE.

She thought she was doing the right thing. She had money saved. She came home. She was buying a house. She needed to get a €140,000 mortgage and no financial institution will take her on because she has to be working in this country for two years before she would be considered for a mortgage. This is mad stuff now. That is exactly the reality. There are people coming home and that is what they face. They will not be considered, never mind approved, for a mortgage. What she was looking for was workable. She had working capital. She was able to do the thing right. Does the Minister of State know what her reaction was? It was that she thought she had made a mistake by coming home. We have to be a bit more pragmatic in our approach. We have to be a bit more clued in to what we want in this country in terms of housing.

The other thing I have a big gripe with is the zoning for houses in our towns and villages. I would say that we are not zoning sufficient or appropriate lands to allow for cheaper lands to become available to build houses on. We are confining ourselves to a core strategy which is holding up prices of development land. Whether we like it or not, that is what is happening because we are making less land available and we are saying one has to have greater densities. There is limited supply available for people who want to buy land and the price goes up. We have to think about that. We should be zoning much more land than we require to make it viable at the end of the day.

Lastly, in County Galway alone we have 28 towns and villages, including Craughwell and Clarinbridge, that do not have a municipal wastewater treatment plant. I keep saying this about towns and villages across the country. We cannot build houses in any of these places. They are frozen out. Houses cannot be built unless we have the infrastructure in place.

See this speech in context